


This Always Happens Again

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU, DCU (Animated), DCU (Comics), DCU (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 22:13:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1915773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an extension of a shorter story by khazadspoon, found <a href="http://khazadspoon.tumblr.com/post/86232016407/hey-if-youre-still-taking-prompts-a-hal-bruce-having">here</a>. You don't need to have read that to understand this, but it would probably help. The idea is, Bruce and Hal have a friends-with-benefits arrangement to help them get their minds off the ones they really want — i.e. Clark and Barry. But then they get found out, and they end up with Clark and Barry after all. My story picks up at that point, because I wanted to know the answer to this question:</p><p>What do you do when the thing you think you are supposed to want is not, as it turns out, the thing you actually want?</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Always Happens Again

"Fuck yes," Hal moaned. "Oh Jesus fuck." He put his head down on his arms and just let himself go limp, just gave himself over to the pounding his ass was getting. It felt like everything was getting fucked out of him—not just all the week's frustration, but all his internal organs as well. 

"Come on," he whispered, "just do it."

"You talk too much," Bruce said above him. And then his hips were being hitched higher, the angle on his gland sharpened even more as that ridiculously enormous cock reamed him out, just fucked him into the mattress.

"Harder," Hal sighed. "I fucking need it, come on." He pushed back onto Bruce's cock as Bruce thrust forward. "That's it, fuck me."

"If you'd shut up," Bruce snarled into his neck, "I'm trying to." In punishment Bruce slowed his thrusts, making them long and agonizingly slow, so Hal felt every excruciating inch of that cock as it slid in and out. He dug his fingers into the mattress and groaned for it. This was like nothing else, like nothing he could get anywhere else, and though he might try to go without it, might try to pretend he didn't really need it, inevitably his body would ache for just the particular angle of Bruce's cock, for a fuck just this rough.

Bruce was picking up speed again, and Hal felt his whole body curl in pleasure. "Uhhnn," he grunted, as Bruce fucked the cum out of him. He was splattering the mattress in slow white drips, and he knew Bruce could feel it.

"You like that," Bruce said above him, with gritted teeth. "You fucking love it."

"Oh God," Hal groaned, his head thrown back. "Oh _Jesus_."

With brutal efficiency, Bruce flipped him over—grabbed his leg and twisted him onto his back, while he was still impaled on Bruce's cock. Bruce pushed his legs back so far his knees were practically over his head, and just fucked the hell out of him, grunting on every thrust now. "You can come inside," Hal said, and then " _aaaggghh_ ," as his second, real orgasm hit, and this time the clench of his hole was so hard it almost hurt, contracting around that cock. His cum shot up in a heavy white arc, squirting his chest.

Bruce's fingers were bruising his shoulders, and then Bruce stilled. "You coming?" Hal whispered, but Bruce's lips were parted, his eyes closed. Hal could feel the pulse of those balls against his ass though, as Bruce filled him, pumped him with cum. 

"Fuck yeah," Hal sighed, squirming against that cock, letting the last aftershocks of his orgasm take him. And then Bruce slowly slid down on him, went boneless and heavy on top of him, not even bothering to pull out. Bruce was hands-down the most inconsiderate asshole of a lover he'd ever been with, and Hal fucking loved it—loved watching Bruce get overwhelmed with pleasure, loved the things that cock could do to him. 

Then Bruce lifted his head. "This. . . doesn't. . . happen again," he panted, his cock slipping slowly out.

"Okay," Hal said, stretching. "Tell me another." He wiped the cum off his stomach with the edge of the sheet.

"I'm serious," Bruce growled. He was hauling himself off the bed now, reaching for his clothes.

"Okay," Hal said again, on a yawn. Getting fucked always left him feeling like this, like he'd had an hour long massage with warm coconut oil. Well, fifteen minutes of Bruce's cock was a lot more efficient. Bruce was dressing in silence, and Hal rolled over, adjusting his pillow, stifling another yawn. He might actually get some sleep tonight. 

"Jordan," Bruce said from the door. He was just standing there, for some reason, and Hal was beginning to get a little irritated, because he really wanted to sleep.

"What."

"You have burn marks on your lower left back that need to be tended."

"Yeah, well, try not to breathe fire next time, I guess."

Bruce snorted. "And you should try not to ignore serious injuries received in combat. It doesn't make you manly, it makes you an irresponsible, immature child."

Hal ignored him and pulled the blanket tighter. "Let me sleep, will you."

He could sense Bruce still standing in the doorway, saying nothing. He kept his eyes shut, and after a minute Bruce was gone.

* * *

It wasn't that he didn't love Barry. 

He did love Barry. He was crazy in love with Barry. He'd been waiting his whole life to get with Barry—or anyway, what felt like his whole life. Being with Barry had felt like a distant dream for so long that he hadn't even let himself think about it for a long time, until all of a sudden it was happening. It was like stepping into a fantasy. Of course he was in love with Barry.

It was just. . . the other kept happening.

It was a sex issue, was the thing. Sex with Barry was great, it was really good, it was. . . nice. But sometimes, he didn't want nice. Sometimes, he wanted to get fucked. Sometimes he wanted to be with someone who didn't give a shit if he was being too rough. Sometimes he wanted to be with someone who could break him. Barry was great in bed, he really was. But he was always checking in with Hal: _this okay? you like this? how does that feel? you want to do this next?_ And sometimes that made Hal want to scream.

But he and Bruce were definitely stopping now. Bruce and Clark were getting as serious as he and Barry were, and he was willing to bet Bruce's guilt issues were as bad as his. So definitely, they were stopping now. 

Definitely, for sure, this time.

* * *

"Oh yeah, come on, like that," Hal murmured. They were in the pipe trunk distribution room, somewhere in the belly of the Watchtower, and they were humping like animals. He was riding Bruce's thigh, and Bruce was rubbing against him, and Bruce's mouth was sloppy and hot against his. Bruce was in the Batsuit, the cowl pushed off his head, and Hal was in uniform, and there were about nine thousand reasons they shouldn't be doing this, but for the life of him Hal couldn't remember a single one of them while Bruce's body was hard against his, and Bruce's fingers were digging into his back. 

"Okay, wait, hang on," Hal panted. "Are we getting naked here or what? Because fuck, I'm gonna come."

Bruce paused. He was looking around the narrow, dark, pipe-entangled space. "I might not have thought this through," he said, and Hal started to laugh, just quietly against his shoulder.

"Says the master strategist. Jesus Christ, do you think with your dick just one hundred percent of the time?"

"You could turn around," Bruce said. 

"Why, because you magically have lube in that belt? I've done a lot of crazy shit in my life, but taking _that_ dick without lube is not going to be one of them."

Bruce pushed him back against the wall, harder. A pipe dug into his back. Bruce wedged a thigh further between his legs. "You complain a hell of a lot," he growled. He was unsnapping the groin catch on his suit with one hand, and Hal tugged at the waist of his pants, working out his cock as best he could.

They went back to grinding, rubbing cocks like horny teenagers. It was pretty amazing that it felt so damn good, and Hal curled his fingers around that perfect ass—or, okay, the armor that covered that perfect ass, but it was still hot. "Oh God, yeah," Hal panted. "Come on, ride me."

Bruce was making a choking sound, pushing into him harder. He buried his face in Hal's neck, and Hal wrapped arms around him. "That's it," he whispered. It was hot as fucking hell, but it kind of took him aback, seeing Bruce come first like that—normally Bruce was Mr. Slow Fuse. He let Bruce ride him through it. Then Bruce was tucking himself back in. 

"Wait, are you fucking serious?" He was louder than he knew he should be, but this was one of those times when "inconsiderate lover" had crossed the line into "unbelievable asshole." His cock was still hard and slicked at the tip, and Bruce was ready to pack it in?

"Shh," Bruce said. And then Bruce was slipping to his knees, and oh. Oh. Hal's head hit the pipe behind him with a thunk as Bruce deep-throated him effortlessly. 

"Fuck your mouth, can I fuck your mouth," Hal whispered. But he was beyond caring, and he couldn't control it anyway. He came down Bruce's throat in a heavy wet rush, in a concentrated orgasm that felt like a cannon firing out his dick. Bruce swallowed, and the working of his throat tugged another spurt of cum from Hal. 

"Jesus, you're good at that," Hal said, when he had breath. 

"It's not rocket science. Pull yourself back together, this is not a secure environment."

"This was _your_ idea, I just—what are you doing."

Bruce had his hand at the waist of Hal's uniform pants, and at first Hal thought he was going to pull up his pants for him, but then he saw he was tugging them down further and frowning at something. "You didn't get the burn treated," he said.

"I did what I could," Hal said curtly.

"What's that mean?"

"It means," he said, yanking his pants away from Bruce's grasp, "that the Black Lanterns have some new and exciting weapons in their repertoire, is what it means. Their rings are laser-equipped, is the best way I can describe it. Cuts right through protective shielding. I just didn't move fast enough."

"Black Lanterns," Bruce said. "That's the first I've heard of their return. Are you sure?"

"Yeah, it's amazing that the Guardians of the Universe don't think to keep a vigilante from Gotham City with no superpowers to speak of up to speed on all the latest deep-space dispatches. You didn't get their memo?"

Bruce ignored his baiting. He just looked thoughtful. "The Black Lantern Corps has never outmatched you. Is it possible they're getting new tech from an outside source?"

"That's where I'd put my money, yes. I have a few ideas about where, but nothing I want to run by the Guardians until I check it out. I'm heading out tomorrow to see what I can find out."

Bruce's thoughtful expression had deepened to a grave one, or maybe that was just the man's resting bitch face. Half the time when he looked his most menacing he was probably just thinking about a sandwich. "That's infected," he said, with another glance at Hal's waist.

"Yeah, I know. It'll be okay. You headed back to Gotham, or you got monitor duty?"

"The latter. My shift starts in half an hour." He was headed to the door of the little room, and Hal could see nothing but a swirl of cape as the cowl was pulled back up. He paused at the door. "Be careful," he said. "And also—"

"This doesn't happen again," Hal finished for him, and then Bruce was gone, the door clanking shut behind him.

* * *

Each time was the last time. 

"What about a pact," Hal suggested. They were lying on the bed in his apartment, which was where they mostly fucked, and they were lying there instead of throwing their clothes immediately on because they had just come too hard to move. Also, Hal was fairly sure his hip was now dislocated. 

"A pact," Bruce said.

"Yeah, a pact. Look, we both know we're fucking up by doing this, so if we like, I don't know, make a pact we won't do it any more, we can hold each other to it. Or something. Like, okay, once Kilowogg and I tried to go a whole week without consuming carbs, which was maybe not the best idea to start when we were based on this planet that pretty much only produced a wheat flour, so there really wasn't that much else to eat. Or not really wheat, more of a cassava. You know cassava? It's like a manioc root, really more potato-y than anything else."

Bruce was looking at him like he had sprung a nosebleed. "Please stop talking," he said. 

"We need a pact," Hal sighed.

"Fine," Bruce said. 

"Really? Okay, that's great. The deal is, if I weaken, you have to be all _Hal, you don't really want to do this_. Or actually it will be more like—" He deepened his voice into a gruff caricature of Bruce. " _Jordan, stop_. And I'll do the same for you. And that way if we both want to do it at the same time, then maybe our combined moral resolve will be strong enough to withstand our. . . you know."

Bruce snorted. "Given our track record, I think any reliance on our moral resolve is misguided at best." He was sitting up now, pulling on his shirt.

"Well," Hal said, "I guess I just have more confidence in us as people than you do. But anyway. . . since we have this pact going on. And since we _know_ we're not going to let this happen again. I was just thinking, I could definitely go again. I mean. . . we're already here."

Bruce glanced at him over his shoulder. "Your refractory period's shorter than mine."

"I can wait. You can get something to eat from the fridge and—" His cell rang, and he reached for it quickly. He hesitated a second too long. "Hey," he said, because it was Barry, of course it was Barry.

Wordlessly Bruce pulled on the rest of his clothes and walked out of the room. "Yeah, I'll be over tonight," Hal said, hating himself with every breath. "I was just getting some rest. Yeah, I know, I need to cut back on the flight schedule. I'll . . . see you in a bit, okay? Yeah, I. . . you too."

He clicked off and found Bruce not gone, as he half-expected he would be, but standing in the doorway, looking at him. Hal put his hands on his face and just lay there. "This has to stop," he said, into his hands.

"Tell me another," Bruce quietly replied. He walked out, and Hal listened to the front door click behind him. After a few minutes his phone buzzed with a text, and he frowned to see it was from Bruce. Bruce had never texted him before. 

_I left some medicated cream on the kitchen counter_ , he wrote. _From Alfred's stores. Put it on that burn._

Hal stared at the text for a few minutes before setting the phone down and shutting his eyes again. There was no possible medication for the burn on his own soul, nothing that could help him where he really needed it. "This is going to stop," he said to the ceiling fan.

* * *

And it would have stopped. He told himself it would have. 

It would have, had his mission to track down that tech not ended in such terrible disaster. If he had not been so terribly mistaken. If he had not been out of comm link with his team for six crucial seconds in which he saw their error but had no time to communicate it to the rest of his team before innocents died. If he had not so thoroughly and irrevocably failed.

Barry was waiting for him when he got home, and one look at his face apparently told Barry how bad it had been, because he asked no questions, just folded Hal into his arms. That was the great thing about Barry, was how he never asked questions. Barry made love to him, and cradled him, and rubbed at the sore spots on his shoulders, and did everything he was supposed to do.

So why could Hal not do the thing he was supposed to do?

About two in the morning he got quietly up from the bed and went into the bathroom, staring for a long time at his reflection in the dim light. Then he smashed his fist into the mirror, and it crazed and shattered, bits of it falling into the sink. There was blood on his knuckles, blood dripping onto the floor, blood swirling in the shiny mirror bits in the sink. And along with the pain was the dawn of satisfaction, and an awakening hunger for more.

In the dark he wrapped his hand in gauze, slipped on his jeans and went out the door, careful to lock it soundlessly behind him. He left a note for Barry on the kitchen counter— _Just needed some air, I'm sorry, please don't worry about me. P.S. Fell in the bathroom, everything's okay_. He cranked his car and sped out onto the highway to Gotham, and he didn't let himself stop to think the whole way there.

He had only been in the Batcave once or twice, but he knew the exterior entrances well enough, and he was willing to bet the scanners were calibrated to admit the Green Lantern—which sure enough they were. The rock wall slid back, and he trotted the half-mile down the length of tunnel to emerge where he knew he would find Bruce. How did he know he would be there? He could have been anywhere—on patrol, out of town, even upstairs sleeping. But something told Hal he wasn't any of those other places, and he wasn't wrong.

"What are you doing here?" Bruce said with a scowl, getting up from his bank of monitors. 

"I fucked up," he said hoarsely, the words somehow easier to say in this dank uncomfortable place than in the warmth of his own apartment. "I fucked up, you wouldn't believe how bad I fucked up."

"I probably would," Bruce said, and Hal shot back with a "Fuck you," but the lack of sympathy was like a cool cloth on a hot wound. Here was the one place no one would make excuses for him.

"That what you're here for?"

"Yeah," he said, knowing he hadn't allowed himself to think that on the drive over here. "Come on, I need it, just fuck it all out of me."

Bruce was unclicking the armor plating on his midsection, setting it aside. "This is probably the point at which to remind you of that pact."

"Stop dicking me over," Hal said. 

Bruce's eyes were steady on him. "Hal," he said. No _Jordan_ this time, evidently. "Go home to Barry. Go home to your nice, safe, compassionate lover who actually gives a shit about you."

"That's rich," Hal said. "That's a good one, coming from you. Like I'm the one with the problem. Like you don't lie in bed and think about me. You tell me you don't. You fucking tell me you don't, you tell me you don't lie in Clark's arms and think about me."

The whipcrack of Bruce's gloved backhand was enough to shatter his cheekbone, but Hal felt only the exhilaration and release of the pain. "You will not say his name," Bruce ground out. 

"I'll say his name any goddamn time I want to. Clark Clark _Clark_. Clark who you should be with right now, who you should be with any of the times you've been fucking me instead. Clark who—"

He blocked the next one, a closed-fist punch to his face, and rolled with it enough to get up under it and deliver a slice to Bruce's jaw that almost made skin contact, even. And then they were grappling, they had rolled to the floor, and Hal was in all honesty getting the shit beaten out of him, but he only laughed through it, laughed like a maniac, because nothing had ever felt so fucking good. A gauntlet closed on his throat, lifting him up by his jaw.

"You want to get fucked? Is that what you want? Is that what Barry won't give you?"

"Fuck yes," he gasped, and he was being flipped onto his face, his bones scraping rock. Bruce was pulling at his jeans, tugging at them like a crazy man.

"You got it," he said, in Hal's ear. "But this is going to be fast, and it's going to be rough, because you've already got me hard and I want in you. I want that unbelievable hole of yours filled with my cum, I want to see you humping the ground."

 _Jesus yes_ Hal tried to say, but a heavy hand was pressing his face into the rock, and thicker fingers were pushing at his ass. He opened his mouth to ask about lube, but if there was any Hal couldn't feel much of it—the stretch and burn was exquisite, the pain like sheet lightning. "Fuck fuck fuck," he groaned.

Bruce's cock was pushing its way inside now, inch by agonizing inch. "Hold it open for me," he gasped, and Hal tried to reach a hand back, tried to pull apart his cheeks to give Bruce some maneuvering room, and when that cock had torn and pushed its way all the way up him, Hal was the one who groaned at it. 

"This what you want," Bruce growled. There was a scrape of teeth at his neck. "This what you need?"

"Yes, come on, that's—"

"Guess what, I don't give a shit. I need to come, so hold still for me, slut."

Hal went limp as Bruce groaned atop him, pounding him into the rock for long minutes punctuated only by Bruce's heavy breathing and grunts. He felt his own orgasm build as his trapped cock began to ache. "Wanna come," he moaned, but the hand in his hair yanked his neck back.

"Don't you dare," Bruce breathed. "You'll take my cock and you'll—fuck," and there was a choked sound and in the heat and burning Hal felt a flood of wet and a final wicked thrust, and his own cock couldn't stop then, cum dribbled out of him and smeared the rock beneath him as his balls pulsed, and he came and came. Bruce just kept riding him through it. 

He did cry out when Bruce pulled out, because that hurt like a motherfucker. He lay stretched ass-up on the rock, limp and destroyed. Bruce got up and walked somewhere else, then came back and knelt beside him. The hand—bare of gauntlet this time—was rubbing some kind of balm between his cheeks, circling his swollen hole, those thick fingers as gentle as they had been brutal three minutes ago. It felt ridiculously good, and Hal relaxed and let him do it. He let Bruce flip him over, too. 

His bandaged hand was lifted, and examined where it had bled through the gauze. Bruce unwrapped it and plucked out some of the remaining slivers of mirror with tweezers, then rewrapped it with fresh gauze he had beside him. He began applying the cream to the rest of the scrapes and bruises peppering Hal's body, working methodically. Hal just watched him.

"Thank you," he said, when Bruce had finished and sat back on his heels. Hal pushed himself up, every muscle protesting. 

"I won't do that again," Bruce said.

"Yeah, yeah, I've heard it before."

"That's not what I meant."

Hal looked shamefaced, and studied the rock beneath his hand. "Yeah," he said. "Sorry. Sometimes I need the pain."

"Perfectly understandable. I'm like that myself. I'm just saying, I can't do it."

"You said _won't_ ," Hal murmured. 

"I say too damn many things."

Hal leaned in and pulled Bruce's mouth into his, resting a hand on the back of his neck. As peace offering, maybe, or in thanksgiving, or just a sign that he understood—though _what_ he understood was less clear. Bruce kissed him back, as slow and easy as Hal's own kiss, like it was something they did all the time, but it wasn't, it really wasn't, and danger danger danger, there were not enough klaxon alarms in the world for the sweet muskiness of Bruce's tongue sliding against his. 

Bruce rose to his knees and rearranged his cape, his suit, looking more or less like he had just stepped out of the armory and not like he had been rutting on the floor ten minutes ago. He held out a hand to hoist Hal up, and he took it. "Leave the car here," Bruce said, walking back to the monitors. "You can call a cab to get back."

"Why the hell would I do that?"

Bruce turned and gave him a once-over that made Hal acutely conscious of his bruises and scrapes. "Because you were in a car accident," he said coolly. "The car's been towed. That's about the only thing that explains it."

"Quite the liar, aren't you."

"Aren't we both."

Hal said nothing to that, because fair was fair. He had turned and was making his way to the exit tunnel when he stopped. "Ever want to not be?" he asked.

Bruce's eyes rested on him, ice-clear even over all that distance, and behind all the remoteness locked into them there was a flicker of something else, that might have been sadness. "Go home," he said eventually. "Go home to where you should be."

It was no more than what he had taunted Bruce with. No more than was fair, after all. "Okay, sure," he said. "But I think we need a new pact."

"Sweet Christ," Bruce muttered, staring at his screens.

* * *

Maybe even then everything would have been fine. 

Maybe even at that point he could have pulled it together, could have broken it off, could have kept lying to himself for years, maybe even his whole life. Looking back on it, he never was sure where the point of no return had been, exactly. But wherever it was, it was somewhere long before the Black Lantern invasion.

"Lantern, in the air, now!" Superman's voice over the comm link was urgent, and Hal knew the plan. They had had a few hours' warning, at least; the Black Lanterns weren't so good that they could evade all the League's defenses and alerts. What they hoped to gain from it was a mystery to Hal, unless they had miscalculated, and had thought key members of the League would be absent. And it was true, they didn't have Diana that day, or Cyborg, but there was enough of them to hold the line.

Or at least, that was what he had thought until the second wave launched, and he had his question about Black Lantern tech answered, because those sons of bitches had allied themselves with the fucking Gordanians, there were Gordanian warships pouring out of a crystal blue sky to rain death on them, and God damn Sinestro, God damn him, he was floating at their head like an Aztec god because of course he was, and Hal should have seen that one coming, he really should have. Thaal Sinestro and his legion of the undead, and trust Sinestro to take that shit intergalactic, to get visions of territorial expansion.

"Lantern, take gamma quadrant," Superman said. "There are civilians over there!"

"On it," he said, zooming to cast a green shield in the half-second before a Gordanian missile exploded over the east bay. But that had been a feint, evidently, because the real firepower was raining just to the southeast, though still in gamma quadrant, so he flew there and blocked as many as he could, always just one millisecond ahead of too late, ahead of not-fast-enough. He worked through minutes that felt like hours, and he knew Sinestro was trying to keep him pinned, trying to keep the ring's power contained, but even knowing it there was nothing he could do but rely on Clark and Bruce and Barry and Shayera to break the stranglehold. 

"Shayera, on your six," he called over the comm, and she said "Got it," and swung her mace with deadly and purposeful intent. But the glance in her direction had been enough for him to see what was about to happen—the Batwing closing on intersect with the sweeping fire of one of those deadly missiles. 

Somehow those missiles had harnessed the energy of a Power Ring, and that combined with the blistering fire that ate right through every protective shielding he knew of was just about the worst case scenario. "Batman, evade!" he shouted, but there was a staticky buzz where his comm ought to be, and damn Sinestro, damn him. That was no accident. 

He had to find a way to warn Clark and the others about the power of that fire. It was possible Clark wasn't even aware of what it could do to human skin. Would it feel any different, grazing that invulnerable Kryptonian epidermis? Would Clark even know to warn the team? "Fuck!" he yelled, blocking another missile, because there was a jagged scar of fire headed straight for the Batwing, and maybe Bruce was thinking his left wing could absorb the hit, but in three more seconds the plane would be engulfed in flames that would sear the skin off his bones and fuck fuck fuck.

He didn't stop to think. He didn't stop to calculate. If there was another workaround, he never stopped to find it. He flew straight at the plane and threw up shielding, but his shielding was too weak for that fire and the Batwing was sliced clean in two, and Bruce was falling, falling through the air, and where was the air support, where the fucking hell was everybody?

Or maybe they were there all along, and he never saw them, because he saw only Bruce.

The whole thing was over in four seconds that felt like four hours, in the way of combat. He had Bruce by the shoulder and was trying to zoom him out of there. "Hold your position, Lantern! There are _civilians!_ Hold your position!" Bruce was shouting at him, and Hal couldn't make sense of it, because he wasn't going anywhere, was he? He was trying to move them out of there, only the pressure on his shielding was too much, it was crumbling. The fire sliced through him and engulfed Bruce, and Hal heard only his own screams.

* * *

When he was eleven, he had broken his arm. 

He had fallen out of Jerry Tomlinson's tree, and twisted at the wrong moment, and shattered his arm pretty good. Jerry's mom had taken him to the ER, because Amber had been in the middle of her shift, not that she probably would have taken him anyway. Probably she would have told him to shut up that whining and go sniffle in the bedroom if he was going to depress hell out of her like that, and he would have had an unmended knot in his forearm the rest of his life, a weak point in the bone, and that would have made the Air Force Academy and flight training impossible. So all things considered it was lucky for him Amber hadn't left work that day, and that the whole thing had happened at Jerry's house.

He remembered the chairs in the ER that day: orange plastic, with scuff marks. He remembered a lot more than just the chairs—he also remembered the exasperated look on Jerry's mom's face after he had gotten off the kitchen phone with Amber, and the way she had cut her eyes at him when the lady at the hospital front desk had asked about insurance, and she had said, "No insurance," in a tight-lipped way. Probably Amber had stuck Mrs. Tomlinson with hundreds of dollars in ER bills. Come to think of it, they had moved from Pikeville to Perry County not long after, and maybe those two events were related. 

Funny how everything in his life could change, but those chairs never changed.

He sat tonight in the contemporary equivalent of those chairs and stared at the scuffed linoleum through his laced fingers, and felt only a vast nothingness — a hole in the center of him so profound, it was like everything had fallen into it, and there wasn't anything left in him to feel.

They had taken Batman to a civilian hospital rather than the Watchtower. His injuries were too severe to wait to open a zeta tube, and Dr. Thompkins' team wouldn't have had everything he needed anyway. With all the civilian deaths and injuries, one more was unremarkable, even if it was Bruce Wayne. It had taken Clark maybe a millisecond to strip the Batsuit off him and wrap him in a blanket, then zoom him to Gotham General. By the time the rest of them arrived, Bruce was in surgery.

Funny, too, how "in surgery" could allow you to hope. It could make you think, in some small un-adult part of you, that somewhere in another room grown-ups were making everything right with the world again. 

Funny how you could think that, if you hadn't been the one to hold Bruce's body when it got a fist-sized hole blown through the middle of it. If you hadn't been the one to hear his small groan as that unearthly fire ripped through him. If you hadn't felt the recoil in his spine, the burning heat of his body.

Hal sat through the long hours, and stared at the floor, a lake of nothingness inside. 

Members of the League came and went—all in civilian clothes, of course. That was another funny thing, was how awkward J'onn and Diana would always look dressed like normal people. Like they were somehow more conspicuous that way, so odd and ill-at-ease were they. Clark never left, of course. Clark sat at the opposite end of the room huddled with Dick, and with Alfred. Tim was there, nervously pacing. And in the second hour of surgery, Hal heard a quick booted step in the hallway outside the waiting room, and then a tall, shockingly good-looking young man was standing there, and Dick was getting up and walking to him, and they had flung arms around each other and stood there locked like that for a minute, before Hal had even put it together who it must be. 

"Hey Hal," Jason said, coming to sit beside him after a bit. It was the first anyone had spoken to him, but it was probably just because Jason didn't feel entirely comfortable over there with the rest of the Batfamily. Commissioner Gordon was there now too, and Batgirl. Jason had an orange soda, and he offered Hal a swig. 

"I'm good, thanks," he said. 

"Dick says it's going to be hours before we know anything. You should go home and get some sleep."

"I'll stick around for a while," Hal said. 

"Suit yourself."

Jason propped his feet on the cheap table and sipped his soda, his leg jiggling nervously. Across the room, Hal felt Barry's eyes on him. 

In hour three, the surgeon came to talk to the family. She looked exhausted, and her hair had sweaty ends and was sticking up in places. She talked long and earnestly in the other corner with Dick and Alfred and Clark, everyone crowding around. Hal stayed where he was, just staring at the floor. He had no right to be over there with them. He was no one. 

In the fifth hour, most of the League had drifted home, or slumped into the chairs to nap for a while. Ollie seemed to get progressively angrier, like he was wandering around looking for something to punch. Hal just sat. Against the opposite wall, removed from the others, sat a small angry-looking boy, whom he almost didn't recognize out of his domino mask and uniform. Hal watched him for a while, then got up and went to sit beside the kid. 

"Hey," he said. Damian was silent. They sat there for a minute, and Hal arranged his thoughts.

"So," Hal said. Damian's brows rushed together.

"I don't like sports," he said. "I don't watch movies, I doubt we share any musical tastes, and your attempt to connect with me is pathetically transparent. I don't require anyone's pity, least of all yours."

"Well, those genes breed true, anyway," Hal said. He weighed and rejected various overtures, at last settling on silence. They watched the comings and goings of nurses and aides through the windows onto the hallway. Hal had just decided to try making up some story about his own non-existent father, when the kid spoke. 

"Do you think I'll have to go back," he said gruffly. He was looking straight ahead, not at Hal.

"Go back?"

"To my mother. If my father dies."

Hal scratched at his jaw. The last thing he would tell this kid of all people, was that everything was going to be all right. "I don't know," he said. "But I do know that your dad doesn't do anything without a plan, and he'll have a plan for you too, if anything happens to him. I promise you, he's already thought about this, and prepared."

"He didn't have a plan for today," Damian said dully, and Hal had no answer to that one, so they sat in silence a bit more.

"How do you get a ring?" he asked.

"A ring?"

"A power ring, like yours. I'm assuming there's a selection process, of some sort?"

"Well. . . it's not exactly as organized as that. Generally the ring will choose a worthy recipient in the immediate area, when the previous owner. . . dies. It isn't exactly a selection process, with applications and things like that."

"Because I was thinking if I can't be Robin, maybe I could acquire one of those."

Hal leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs and bowing his head while he thought. "This is what I think," he said eventually. "I think you would make a fine Lantern, one day. But I also think you have lots of skills that mean someone like you doesn't need a power ring to make a difference. Your dad never needed one."

"Needs," Damian said. "You said needed, past tense. Aren't you supposed to not do that?"

"Well I'll tell you," he said. "I suck at doing what I'm supposed to do."

"Aren't Lanterns always supposed to do their duty?"

"When you grow up, you'll discover that your duty isn't always as simple as you thought it was."

"Don't patronize me," he said, but reflexively, with no bite to it. 

"Hey listen," Hal said, knocking his knee against Damian's. "You were Dick's Robin for a while, when your dad was gone before. I don't think you have to give up being Robin, if your dad goes away again." 

"Will he," Damian said, low and looking at his small knotted hands.

"I don't know," Hal said. "I do know that he is in a room not too far away, fighting with everything in him not to leave you. And if he does leave, it will be because he had no other choice, and he lost the fight. Everybody has a fight they lose, in the end. Even your dad."

The dark head nodded jerkily. Hal kept sitting there and pretended he didn't notice the silent shake of the thin shoulders.

* * *

In hour eleven, the surgeon re-emerged, accompanied by her team this time, and one look at their faces told Hal the answer.

She looked more exhausted than ever, and the gray circles under her eyes had gray circles, but there was triumph in her eyes, and a small smile curling her tired mouth. The family swarmed around her, and soon Hal could catch words like "stable" and "fighter" and "next twenty-four hours," but he also caught the note of optimism behind her cautiously guarded words. 

Alfred was sagging in relief against Tim, who was grinning from ear to ear, and Dick smothered Damian in an enormous hug, and Barbara was actually laughing, she was so happy. They were all just so grateful and happy, and no one spared a glance for him. It had nothing to do with him. The room was as full of joy as it had been fear and tension just a minute before, and in the midst of the celebration, Hal slipped out the door.

He found an empty room at the end of the hall—some sort of place with vending machines and tables, but it was dim and unused, and he didn't give a fuck what was in the room anyway. He closed the door and braced himself against the wall, pressed his hands against the wall. He pressed as hard as he could, hard enough to bring the walls down, only it was the walls inside him that gave, and he broke.

His arms shook with everything he had not let himself feel for the past eleven hours, eleven days, eleven months. Because if it had been possible to lie to himself before, it was no longer. He would walk out of this room and keep lying, but for now, for these few minutes, he could tell the truth, because Bruce had almost died. Bruce had almost died, and the crater of emptiness in his center had turned into a hot core of unnameable something, and what an idiot—what a fucking idiot—he had been to think that love was this nice soft comfortable feeling of ease and warmth. That was bullshit. It was having your insides ripped out of you, it was lying broken and bleeding on the floor, it was death and devastation. All his life he had been waiting for the wrong thing, and wasn't that just the kicker, wasn't that just the hell of it.

He let himself sob then—ugly, dry, hacking sobs of gratitude that a God he had never much seen the use for had somehow decided to let Bruce live. "Fuck," he gasped, as another wave gripped him, and tore its way out his throat. 

He shut his eyes and bowed his head and didn't even try to stop the shaking in his arms or the shuddering in his throat. When he looked up, Barry was leaning against the wall next to him. Hal angled his face away.

"You gonna be okay," Barry said, and Hal nodded, still keeping his face turned away.

"Okay," Barry said. He watched Hal for a minute, and Hal let him. He had come into this room, by himself, where he could let it be written all over him, and he couldn't erase it now. Barry was a lot of things, but Barry wasn't stupid. 

"You need to get your shoulder looked at," Barry said. "You took quite a hit. You should have gotten it looked at earlier."

He shook his head. He needed to say something, but he couldn't. Whatever Barry expected of him, he couldn't do it right now. Not here. 

"I'll head home then," Barry said after a while, and Hal still said nothing, because he still couldn't. Barry left as quietly as he had arrived.

* * *

When Clark and Barry had come across the two of them fucking around, Hal had thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen. That Barry had seen him like that, that Barry might think all the wrong things about him, about him and Bruce—it had been unbearable. He had been frantic to fix it, to erase what Barry had seen. He could hear his voice trying to explain it, all the painful fumbling of it: _let me explain. . . it was just physical. . . if I can't have you. . ._

And then, the worst: _We can't get what we want so we settled for cheap fucks._

It was that sentence that made the nausea rise in his gullet, that sentence more than anything that made him want to puke his guts out in shame. _Cheap fuck_. That was Bruce he had been talking about, and he had been so desperate for the thing he thought he wanted that he had thrown Bruce under the bus without a second thought. 

Maybe Bruce had said something similar to Clark. _Oh really_ , said the voice inside his head. _You think he called you a cheap fuck?_

Who knew what Bruce had said to Clark, actually. Something to make him believe that what was between him and Hal was only physical, something to persuade him. And maybe in Bruce's case it really was the truth; maybe the two of them really did belong together, who knew. But for Hal, he was done with lying. 

He pulled into the parking space at his apartment and took the stairs slowly. It was dark, but he wasn't sure what day it was, time had gotten so distorted at the hospital, and he was bone tired. Barry was right, he should have gotten the shoulder looked at. But he knew what he would see when he opened the door of his apartment, and for a minute he stood there, putting his key in the drawer, taking off his jacket, preparing himself for what had to be said.

Which as it turned out was very little.

"We can do this later if you want," Barry said, as he sat on the sofa. Affable Barry, easygoing Barry, Barry who had never asked to be lied to. Was it lying if you didn't know it was a lie?

"I'm sorry," Hal began, knowing how pathetically inadequate it was.

"I'm not asking for an apology," Barry said. There was a small flush on his cheeks, but he looked as tired as Hal felt. "It's just. . . Jesus Hal, do you know what it felt like to watch you bleeding out in the waiting room all night long?"

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I thought I was just sitting there."

"You were. But I could see. Do you—" He wiped a weary hand over his face. "Are you in love with him?"

"Yes."

"Did you ever stop sleeping with him?"

"No."

"You were lying to me this whole time?"

"Yes. But I was lying to myself, too, if that makes you feel any better."

"It really doesn't, thanks. Any particular reason why you didn't just tell me this months ago, and save us both a lot of grief? I mean for God's sake, Hal, it's not like our kids are sleeping in the next room. We're dating, it's not the end of the world if one of us decides it's not working. What exactly was your motivation to lie here? Are you just such a liar that you need the lies, that you can't stop yourself?"

"Maybe," he said. "It's just. . . this is everything I was supposed to want."

Barry looked at him curiously. "Everything you were _supposed_ to want. What the hell does that mean?"

"It means I had spent so many years believing I was in love with you I never stopped to figure out if I actually was."

"Well. When you decide to tell the truth you don't do it by halves, do you?"

"I'm sorry. You have every right to walk out of here and never talk to me again. I realize I've probably destroyed our friendship, and that I've done things there's. . . no going back from."

Barry was standing now, his hands in his pockets, regarding him oddly. "Does Bruce feel the same way about you?"

"Probably not."

"I see." Barry nodded. "So you kind of fucked everything up, huh?"

"Oh yeah."

"Situation normal, then."

"Absolutely."

There was a small bleak smile on Barry's face. He put a hand on Hal's shoulder, and Hal swayed at it. "Get some sleep," he said. "You look awful. And. . . for what it's worth. The worst part about tonight was seeing you hurt so bad, and knowing there was nothing I could do to help it. I don't know what that means, but it probably doesn't mean 'never talk to me again.'" He slid his hand down Hal's arm and gave his wrist a light squeeze, then he had brushed past and was on his way out the door before Hal had even formulated any kind of response.

He didn't bother to make it to the bed, but curled up on the sofa Barry had vacated and slept in his clothes, hoping the morning light would bring some clarity—and hoping more deeply than that that in some room of Gotham General, that strong, stubborn, lacerated heart kept beating.

* * *

He didn't go back down to the hospital after that. He stayed up-to-date on how Bruce was doing, because Clark did a great job of e-mailing and texting everyone. Way better than Bruce would have done, were the situation reversed. If Clark had been injured, they would have been lucky to get one cryptic text message a week out of Bruce, and it would probably consist of two words: _still alive_. Fortunately Clark had functional emotions, and could actually communicate with people, so Hal didn't need to go to the hospital to know that Bruce had rapidly stabilized after the touch-and-go of the surgery, during which he had coded twice on the table. 

He tried not to think about what those moments of coding must have been like, and the steady whine of the heart monitors as Bruce flatlined. 

There was no League business during the days after the attempted Gordanian incursion (or if there was, Clark was dealing with it himself) and no Lantern business, so Hal concentrated on logging the flights he was behind on for the month and getting some actual work done. It helped because it kept him from thinking, and thinking was where he got himself into trouble. If he thought, he thought about being down at Gotham General, about being able to see Bruce. But that wasn't for him.

The morning after he and Barry had talked, he had stumbled up from the sofa and grabbed his keys, ready to head back down to the hospital. He had been on the landing before he had stopped and thought, what the hell am I doing? Bruce needed his family around him now. He needed Clark, not some lying sack-of-shit fuck-up who was about as in touch with his feelings as a middle-school boy. Hal would just be in the way there, and with what Clark knew of their history, he was betting he would be an uncomfortable presence. Not that Clark would make him feel that way. But this was Clark's space with Bruce, and it was time for him to recede into the background. So he had gone slowly back up the stairs and dropped his keys back on the hall table and said "Well, _fuck_ ," in a loud voice. 

Sometimes being an adult fucking sucked. 

On the fourth day after Bruce's surgery, there was a knock on his door. "Yeah," he called, because he had just uncapped a beer and was about to flick on the game he had recorded, and the door was unlocked anyway. It took him half a second to place the tall guy slouching under the baseball cap standing in his front hall, because of that way Clark had of erasing himself when he was in civvies. You wouldn't think a guy built like a brick shithouse could disappear so effectively, but he could.

"Hey," Hal said in some surprise. "I was just cracking open a beer. You want one?"

"I'm good," he said. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Ah. . . about to watch the game? What do you mean?"

Clark licked his lips. He looked tired. "I mean, is there any particular reason you haven't been to see Bruce?"

Hal was standing in the middle of his living room like an idiot, holding a beer he suddenly knew he wouldn't drink. "It's been a pretty busy few days at the airstrip," he said. 

"Oh is that so."

"Yes, actually," he said.

"Too busy for you to come see your friend who came as close as he ever has to _dying_ , even in a lifetime of nearly successful attempts at it. Just. . . too busy for that?"

"Yeah," Hal said, through dry lips.

"I see. Well, it might interest you to know that he thought you were dead."

"I. . . what?" He could feel the beer starting to slip through his fingers.

"Yes," Clark said tersely. "He's doing all right, but it's slow going—you know, he sleeps a lot. But when he woke up this afternoon he asked me if he'd missed your service, and I didn't know what he was talking about. What service, I said. He meant your funeral. He was worried that he had been unconscious, and that we had decided to have it without him, and that he had missed it."

"Oh Jesus," Hal said. His lips weren't so much dry as numb now.

"Well put. So I got to tell him you had actually survived, which was news to him. Tell you what I did though, I gave you a convenient injury. Nothing too serious, but enough you might be moving a bit slow. So you're welcome."

Hal slid to the sofa and put his head in his hands. He could feel the shaking start back in his arms, and worked to suppress it. "Funny thing," Clark said. "When I told him you were alive, he looked pretty much like you do right now. Wonder why that is?"

Hal turned his face away from Clark. He did not need to fuck anything else up. He would not fuck up Bruce's life for him. "I was. . . trying to be respectful," Hal said. "I was trying to give you guys some space."

"Space for what? Respectful of what? What the hell are you talking about?"

"I. . . for you. . ." He bit his lip to the blood. Blood like Bruce's smeared on his arms, his chest where he had held him. "Because of. . . before," he said lamely. "I thought, you know, with things like they are between you and Bruce, that being at Bruce's bedside, it might not be, you know . . . the place for me."

Clark had pulled off the baseball cap and was twisting it in his hands, staring at him in genuine puzzlement. "With things like they are between me and Bruce?"

"With the. . . and the. . . you know, the two of you." He settled for an utterly inadequate hand gesture that he hoped wasn't taken as obscene. 

"Are you. . . Hal, do you somehow think that Bruce and I are dating?"

Once, he had read this thriller-detective novel where there was about half a chapter written from the victim's point of view, and the writer had described this woman's moment of terrified astonishment as "feeling the reversal of all the blood in her body." He had thought that was the stupidest description he had ever read. How could somebody's blood actually reverse? What would that even feel like? And it was moronic anyway, because it wasn't like all the blood in your body was even going the same direction to begin with, so what kind of idiot felt something like that?

Him, evidently. The beer glugged quietly onto his carpet. With a rapid _click-click-click_ his brain replayed for him every scene from the last eleven months, and the truth crunched him in the gut. 

Bruce wasn't seeing Clark.

Bruce had never been seeing Clark.

But he had just assumed. . .

"We dated for about a week," Clark was saying evenly. "It just wasn't right for us. Besides, I can't help but think. . . Bruce had other things on his mind."

 _This doesn't happen again_ , Bruce had said, over and over.

Not because of Clark.

Because of _him_. Because Bruce was telling _himself_ , over and over, that he wouldn't let Hal do this to him any more, that he wouldn't keep taking the bits and pieces of Hal that were left over from Barry, when all along—

He stood so fast he almost knocked over the coffee table. "I have to go," he said. 

Clark was frowning at him. "Are you all right? I mean, I admit I was making that up about you being injured, but are you sure you're feeling okay? Are you—Hal?"

But Hal only heard the first part, because he was grabbing his keys and heading out the door, racing down the landing to his car, and yeah, maybe that was a shitty thing to do to Clark, but in the list of his fuck-ups, _bad host_ was so far down the list it didn't even place this week.

* * *

Part of him had hoped Bruce would be dozing when he got there. And then he could sit quietly beside him and watch him sleep, and after a while Bruce would open his eyes, and they would gaze at each other, and everything would be said without words. 

That sort of thing only happened in movies, of course. 

In reality, Bruce was awake, and when he saw Hal the only thing that happened was he scowled at him and said, "Did you tell my son he could become a Green Lantern?"

Hal stood there blinking. "I. . . maybe?" It was hard to remember what he had said to Damian. 

"For God's sake, you idiot. He's spent the last two days laying plans to steal the Javelin and fly it to Oa to present himself to the Guardians. I only know about it because I designed the security system that keeps the Javelin in its docking bay, so I receive alerts when someone—even a very clever someone—attempts to subvert it." He gestured at the tablet beside him. 

Hal winced. "I was trying to be comforting." 

"Well done."

"Sorry. I'm. . . not very experienced with kids."

Bruce gave a bark of laugh that obviously caught him wrong, because a spasm of pain crossed his face, and he reached for the cup of water. "Well," he said, replacing the water, "in fairness, I don't know that experience would necessarily help with Damian. He is. . . another order of thing altogether."

"Not unlike his father," Hal said, settling into the chair beside the bed. Bruce gave him a sharp look. 

"I'm not dead," Hal tried, by way of conversation.

"I noticed."

"I'm not. . . injured, either."

"I noticed that too."

"Well," Hal said, nettled. "It could have been internal injuries. You wouldn't necessarily know from looking."

"How much longer is this guilt visit going to last?"

"Okay, but it might surprise you to learn I don't actually feel guilt for saving your life."

"Saving my—" Bruce was interrupted by a coughing fit, which apparently caused him more pain, because he took another swallow of water and flicked the dial up on his morphine pump. "Saving my life," he repeated. "You _endangered_ my life. You abandoned your sector, ignored direct orders, and did everything possible to get us both killed."

"You had no idea what that fire could do," Hal said. "You had no idea what would happen if—"

"I had _every_ idea what would happen, and I had already taken suitable precautions. I had seen what the Black Lanterns could do to you, and I thought it was reasonable to expect the League might be coming in contact with their tech at some point, even if _you_ chose not to share your intel with the rest of the League. I'm alive today because of the recently installed dampeners in the Batwing and my suit, not because of your ill-conceived heroics."

Hal studied his hands in silence, acknowledging the justice of Bruce's remarks, even as he felt their deep injustice. "Then tell me," he said quietly, "tell me you wouldn't have done the same. If it had been me falling out of the sky and on fire, tell me you wouldn't have done the exact same. Lie to me and tell me you wouldn't have."

Bruce said nothing. "That's what we do, isn't it," Hal said. "Lie to each other? I can't do it anymore. I asked you before if you wanted to stop, and you wouldn't answer me. What if I asked today?"

There was still no answer. "Bruce. Please. The reason I stayed away was because—"

"I know why you stayed away." Bruce's eyes were drifting shut, and Hal remembered he had upped his morphine. "I'm tired," he murmured. "You're exhausting. Go home, go be somewhere you're supposed to be."

Hal considered, then picked up Bruce's hand and held it gently in his. "Okay," he said, so he stayed. 

Bruce's breathing settled and evened, and Hal watched him sleep. Maybe it was just the drugs, but he hadn't pulled his hand out of Hal's. After about twenty minutes he roused and coughed again, and Hal helped him sit up and take a bit more water, and eased him back down. As he was re-settling, Bruce's hand nudged against his, and Hal laced their fingers together again.

A nurse came in at shift change and wrote her name on the dry-erase board, checking his monitors, but quietly, so as not to disturb him. Hal didn't move his hand, and it was a funny thing—he and Bruce had fucked each other's bodies six ways to Sunday, and there wasn't a crevice, plane, or angle of that glorious body he hadn't mapped with his hands, but nothing had ever felt as intimate as the simple act of holding his hand like this in the presence of another person. 

Bruce's eyes slid open after a bit. "You died," he murmured, half-drugged and sleepy. "That. . . doesn't happen again."

"Yeah, but I didn't really," Hal whispered back, knowing Bruce couldn't really hear him anyway. He let himself lean in and stroke that dark hair like he wanted to, and Bruce went back to sleep. 

One of these days, he would get that movie moment, in all its perfection. This definitely wasn't it; this wasn't even some sort of happy ending. This was a maybe, but right now, he would double down all his money on that "maybe," because even if he lost, it was better to lose on the truth than win on a lie, and how goddamn pathetic was it that it taken him nearly four decades to work that one out. Pretty goddamn stupid.

"I'm sure you'll be happy to tell me just how stupid, when you wake up," he said quietly to Bruce's sleeping form, and he smiled, settling in to finish with his free hand the crossword someone had left on the table.


End file.
